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Wednesday, 28 May 2008

With my Dell Precision M6300, I was given a Logitech MX Revolution Rechargeable Cordless Laser Mouse. There's a review here. This is a great looking mouse with a good feel (if you're right-handed). It has the usual buttons and wheels. Compared to other laser mice, it has the same smooth flow and precision.

The greatest feature however, and it's stand-out point is the wheel. The wheel can change from a click-wheel to a free wheel. By default in Linux (no special drivers loaded) The wheel button itself changes this behaviour, which means you don't have a middle-button (button 2). If you use this for Firefox tabs, or pasting, you will find this a real pain!

Windows users get an extra feature: Depending on how fast you scroll the wheel, the click-scroll will automatically disable, allowing the wheel to free spin for quite a few seconds. When it stops, the click-feature automatically sets back in. You can hear this with a small "clunk". Logitech claims this is great for navigating very large documents quickly. I like it because I like watching shiny things spin :)

I assumed I would be left without this in Linux however, as weird Windows driver stuff is usually not available. Think again! Thanks to Some Guy there is a program called revoco to control it. Petteri Räty (betelgeuse) has created an ebuild for Gentoo. Follow his instructions, and be sure to read the comments, as you will find some useful info there. I had to do the following:

Edit revoco-0.3.c and change the value of #define MX_REVOLUTION to the value you get for you mouse from `lsusb`. Mine is c525.

The auto setting was a bit whacko by default - the solenoid was clicking on and off without even moving the wheel. This worked:$ sudo revoco auto=10

Setting the manual click change to button "6" (find button) gives you the middle click (button 2) back *woot*$ sudo revoco manual=6and also gets rid of that annoying "search" keyevent which I have a keyboard for :)

But unfortunately, when I set the manual=6 option, the auto scroll feature turns off again :| But that's a small price to pay!

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

I'm using revoco 0.5 (which includes a change to detect the newer 0xc525 version MX Revolution, so no need to patch it now).

I set auto=10, which seems a reasonable value. With three MX Revolutions I tried, doing this caused the middle mouse button to cease controlling the hyperscroll, and behave as a MMB should. Perhaps if you set manual=3 again, you'll find that setting auto then has the desired effect of enabling velocity-sensitive hyperscroll switching and also enabling the MMB for normal use. Or perhaps it always worked that way, and you didn't notice.

Or perhaps I misinterpreted your post, and you really want to have the search button switch between modes as well as having auto-hyperscroll. I don't have a solution for that either :)